While yesterday was Memorial Day in the United States, it didn't stop Ghostcrawler from being active on the forums. He took the opportunity to respond to a thread regarding the new Mastery system coming with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. More specifically, he went into detail about the design intent of the system, and tried to clear up some confusion a lot of players have had behind the system and the "mastery" stat that will appear on items in the expansion.
Mastery Design Intent (Source)
The passive talent tree bonuses are intended to let you get better at your intended spec just by spending points in the tree. We felt like talents had gotten to a place where they had lost some of their original goal for allowing player customization. So many talent points were considered mandatory just to make your character functional that there were very few actual choices you could make.
(We call the passive talent tree bonuses "passive talent tree bonuses" to differentiate them from the mastery stat on gear, which affects only the third talent tree bonus. We came to that distinction late and are honestly a little sloppy about the nomenclature to this day, so "mastery" sometimes gets used interchangeably as the talent tree passives themselves and as the stat on gear that affects the third of those passives.)
In Cataclysm we have an opportunity to get a lot of those passive talents out of the talent trees. At the same time, we do need to allow for a distinction between say the higher damage and lower survivability of a Fury warrior compared to a Protection warrior. If individual talents shoulder too much of that burden, then the talents aren't much of a choice. Instead, we give you passive bonuses just for spending points in the tree. Protection warriors care most about reducing damage and maintaining threat, so those are the first two passive talent bonuses. The third one we wanted to feel specific to the Prot warrior tree, so that one is going to relate to blocking with a shield.
Another way to think about it is that each talent in the Protection tree also says "and reduces incoming damage by X, increases damage done by Y when tanking, and increases block effectiveness by Z."
I wouldn't say that we intended for all of these passives to be super sexy. It's more accurate to say that we use them to allow the talents themselves to be more exciting and ideally game-changing and a little less "kitchen sinky."
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